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I'm just assuming materialism, and that assumption is basically for complete lack of convincing alternatives (to me). With "agency" I just mean the ability to

• lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  This is all very hand wavy. You don't address in the least what I've written. My criticisms stand. Otherwise... > I'm just assuming materialism, and that assumption is basically for complete lack of convincing alternatives (to me). What do you mean by "materialism"? Materialism has a precise meaning in metaphysics (briefly, it is the res extensa part of Cartesian dualism with the res cogitans lopped off). This brand of materialism is notorious for being a nonstarter. The problem of qualia is a big one here. Indeed, all of what Cartesian dualism attributes to res cogitans must now be accounted for by res extensa, which is impossible by definition. Materialism, as a metaphysical theory, is stillborn. It can't even explain color (or as a Cartesian dualism would say, the experience of color). Others use "materialism" to mean "that which physics studies". But this is circular. What is matter? Where does it begin and end? And if there is matter, what is not matter? Are you simply defining everything to be matter? So if you don't know what matter is, it's a bit odd to put a stake in "matter", as it could very well be made to mean anything, including something that includes the very phenomenon you seek to explain. This is a semantic game, not science. Assuming something is not interesting. What's interesting is explaining how those assumptions can account for some phenomenon, and we have very good reasons for thinking otherwise. > With "agency" I just mean the ability to affect the physical world (not some abstract internal property). Then you've rendered it meaningless. According to that definition, nearly anything physical can be said to have agency. This is silly equivocation. > Regarding "computers have no concepts of things": I'm happy with the "meaning" of something being a fuzzy cloud in some high dimensional space, and consider this plausible/workable both for our minds and current LLMs. This is total gibberish. We're not talking about how we might represent or model aspects of a concepts in some vector space for some specific purpose or other. That isn't semantic content. You can't sweep the thing you have to explain under the rug and then claim to have accounted for it by presenting a counterfeit.
  • myrmidon 1y ago
    By "materialism" I mean that human cognition is simply an emergent property of purely physical processes in (mostly) our brains. All the individual assumptions basically come down to that same point in my view. 1) Human intelligence is entirely explicable in evolutionary terms What would even be the alternative here? Evolution plots out a clear progression from something multi-cellular (obviously non-intelligent) to us. So either you need some magical mechanism that inserted "intelligence" at some point in our species recent evolutionary past, or an even wilder conspiracy theory (e.g. "some creator built us + current fauna exactly, and just made it look like evolution"). 2) Intelligence strictly biological Again, this is simply not an option if you stick to materialism in my view. you would need to assume some kind of bio-exclusive magic for this to work. 3) Silicon is somehow intrinsically bound up with computation I don't understand what you mean by this. > It can't even explain color Perceiving color is just how someones brain reacts to a stimulus? Why are you unhappy with that? What would you need from a satisfactory explanation? I simply see no indicator against this flavor of materialism, and everything we've learned about our brains so far points in favor. Thinking, for us, results in and requires brain activity, and physically messing with our brains operation very clearly influences the whole spectrum of our cognitive capabilities, from the ability to perceive pain, color, motion, speech to consciousness itself. If there was a link to something metaphysical in every persons brain, then I would expect at least some favorable indication before entertaining that notion, and I see none (or some plausible mechanism at the very least).
    • lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      > By "materialism" I mean that human cognition is simply an emergent property of purely physical processes in (mostly) our brains. Again, this doesn't say what a "physical process" is, or what isn't a physical process. If "physical process" means "process", then the qualification is vacuous. > All the individual assumptions basically come down to that same point in my view. You're committing the fallacy of the undistributed middle. Just because both the brain and computing devices are physical, it doesn't follow that computers are capable of what the brain does. Substitute "computing devices" with "rocks". > So either you need some magical mechanism that inserted "intelligence" at some point in our species recent evolutionary past, or an even wilder conspiracy theory (e.g. "some creator built us + current fauna exactly, and just made it look like evolution"). How intelligence came about is a separate subject, and I regrettably got sidetracked. It is irrelevant to the subject at hand. (I will say, at the risk of derailing the main discussion again, that we don't have an evolutionary explanation or any physical explanation of human intelligence. But this is a separate topic, as your main error is to assume that the physicality of intelligence entails that computation is the correct paradigm for explaining it.) > Again, this is simply not an option if you stick to materialism in my view. you would need to assume some kind of bio-exclusive magic for this to work. This is very difficult to address if you do not define your terms. I still don't know what matter is in your view and how intentionality fits into the picture. You can't just claim things without explanation, and "matter" is notoriously fuzzy. Try to get a physicist to define it and you'll see. > Perceiving color is just how someones brain reacts to a stimulus? Why are you unhappy with that? What would you need from a satisfactory explanation? I already explained that materialism suffers from issues like the problem of qualia. I took the time to give you the keywords to search for if you are not familiar with the philosophy of mind. In short, if mind is matter, and color doesn't exist in matter, then how can it exist in mind? (Again, this is tangential to the main problem with your argument.) > Thinking, for us, results in and requires brain activity, and physically messing with our brains operation very clearly influences the whole spectrum of our cognitive capabilities, from the ability to perceive pain, color, motion, speech to consciousness itself. I never said it doesn't involve physical activity. In fact, I even granted you, for the sake of argument, that it is entirely physical to show you the basic error you are making. > If there was a link to something metaphysical in every persons brain, then I would expect at least some favorable indication before entertaining that notion, and I see none (or some plausible mechanism at the very least). I don't think you know what metaphysics is. Metaphysics is not some kindof woo. It is the science of being and what must be true about reality for the observed world to be what and how it is in the most general sense. So, materialism is a metaphysical theory that claims that all that exists is matter, understood as extension in space (this is what "res extensa" refers to). But materialistic metaphysics is notoriously problematic, and I've given you one of the major problems it suffers from already (indeed, eliminativism was confected by some philosophers as a desperate attempt to save materialism from these paradoxes by making a practice out of denying observation in Procrustean fashion).